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On Wed, 2 Apr 2008, Stephen Rothwell wrote:I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to go through subsystem trees, but on the other hand I also don't think it should necessarily be a goal in itself. For example, we had a patch-series from Roland McGrath that was apparently almost entirely based on the fact that going through (and getting sign-off) from all the architecture maintainers for his ptrace changes was just painful as hell for him. At that point, when there is somebody like Roland who knows the rare and odd ptrace interfaces, having him jump through hoops just to go through "proper channels" is in my opinion just anti-productive (especially since I also think the "political" aspect of the problem causes the actual technical side of the patches to suffer - because they are more about the politics than about the technology). So at some point, subsystem mainteinance should also be about picking up and handling the changes that come the other way. The kernel development isn't a strict hierarchy, and shouldn't be - it's more of a network of trust. In other words, there are people I think are generally trusted across most maintenance borders. Al, as far as I'm concerned, is one of them. Especially sicne he is also one of the few people who clearly not only does run sparse but also looks at the code and actually fixes real bugs with byte order etc - regardless of where it is (ie he works across drivers, filesystems, an arch-specific code) In other words, I don't think the borders are so tightly drawn, and the same way I trust the individual developers who send me patches (and git trees) rather than whatever _companies_ they happen to work, I also tend to trust individual developers rather than the _subsystem_ that they happen to maintain. Of course, there's often a rather direct mapping between the two, where people naturally have the area they work in. But some people cross across any particular area, and while that tends to be unusual, that very much includes people like Andrew and Al. In other words, at least to me it's not about "person X maintains file Y". It's much more about "I trust person X (perhaps within parameters Z)". And I don't think that's even unusual or even really unexpected. And I think that's how we all work (and how we _should_ work), but sometimes people get so used to the fact that some people are fairly tightly associated with certain code that they think it's about the subsystem, not about the person. Linus --